Human Rights ★ Social Justice ★ Ethical Design

‘Our lives are a string of experiences. Experiences with people and experiences with things. And we, as designers — as the people who craft experiences — have a profound responsibility to make every experience as beautiful, as comfortable, as painless, as empowering, and as delightful as possible.’

11 May, 2015So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish Following the election of a Tory government with a mandate to further mass surveillance, we’re leaving the UK to avoid the possibility of having to add backdoors to our products at Ind.ie.

13 Jan, 2015On iteration At Ind.ie, we appreciate your support but we will never pander to it.

9 Jan, 2015Islam is Privilege. You cannot both purport to support social justice and attempt to protect privilege from criticism.

4 Dec, 2014The Camera Panopticon Multi-billion-dollar Silicon Valley companies and their long tail of startups are gathering huge amounts of data about the world and about us. It’s time we began to understand why they’re doing it and what exactly is at stake.

19 Nov, 2014Alternatives Not everyone who works at a spyware company agrees with the business model. Can we blame them unless we build alternative independent organisations they can work at?

8 Nov, 2014Why? Is wanting to make the world that you live in better an altruistic pursuit or simply a manifestation of selfishness?

25 Oct, 2014Spyware vs Spyware. Using the status quo against the interests of the status quo is essential pragmatism for those building alternatives.

9 Sep, 2014Privacy as Innovation. Last week, I was in Istanbul to take part in the UN-organised Internet Governance Forum (IGF) where I took part in a panel on Privacy as Innovation. In this initial article, I want to introduce my thoughts on the subject.

22 Aug, 2014Spyware 2.0 It’s time we evolved the meaning of a familiar term from the personal computer era to tackle the challenges of the Internet era.

16 Jun, 2014Be Democracy. I’m the guest editor for the Nobel Peace Center’s Be Democracy exhibit this week. Follow along at @BeDemocracy.

02 Jun, 2014How Web 2.0 killed the Internet. We were told that Open APIs from companies like Facebook and Twitter would make the web a better, more open place. They’ve had the opposite effect. Find out why that’s not a surprising outcome given that they were never created for that purpose to begin with.

12 Mar, 2014Towards an Indie Tech Manifesto On the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web, these are some of my longform thoughts as I work towards formulating a manifesto for Indie Technology. Indie Technology is the heir to both the free software and open source movements. It is the antidote for the erosion of our fundamental freedoms in the post-Snowden era by companies like Google and Facebook that espouse the business model of corporate surveillance. (15 minute read.)

4 Mar, 2014RightsCon or a right con? Are folks in Silicon Valley genuinely ignorant of the relationship between corporate surveillance and government surveillance? Or is it wilful ignorance? Or is this just a textbook example of institutional corruption at work? Are the organisers of RightsCon actively supporting the whitewashing of a business model (monetising data/corporate surveillance) that is directly responsible for the dragnet government surveillance that we’ve been alerted to by Edward Snowden? Corporations like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are painting themselves as the victims when they are every bit the perpetrators and it appears that some of us are buying into their story hook, line, and sinker. (9 minute read.)

22 Feb, 2014Let’s build a care.data that actually cares about your data. NHS England’s care.data programme can be implemented in a way that respects privacy and the right of people to own their own data. In this article, written in response to Ben Goldacre’s piece in The Guardian, I outline three indie data principles that any such implementation must satisfy. (5 minute read.)

31 Dec, 20132014: The Rise of Indie Tech The post-Snowden world is not necessarily all doom-and-gloom as people around the world — including myself — are working to redecentralise the web and create a new breed of independent technologies. (7 minute read.)

31 Aug, 2013The missing quadrant of consumer technology. Experience‐driven Open (XO) is the missing quadrant of consumer technology. It is essential that we start building products that fall under this category of technology if we want to craft a future society where individuals own their digital selves. (1 minute read.)

31 Aug, 2013Trickle‐down technology and why it doesn’t work. Just as the unprecedented global wealth gap between the super rich and everyone else proves that trickle‐down economics doesn’t work, the glaring lack of open source adoption in the consumer space indicates that trickle‐down technology isn’t working either. (7 minute read.)

6 Aug, 2013On owning your own data. Owning your own data is like owning your own home. Unfortunately, we live in a world where our only option is to rent from companies that snoop on us. Prometheus aims to change that. (4 minute read.)

2 July, 2013Codename Pro­me­th­eus is a new initiative to create an open platform that competes on user experience in the consumer space. (10 minute read.)